“Yes, in my father’s sailing ships. X have crossed the seas of Harpent, clear around the lands End of Scorman. Out into the unknown three days journey, in pursuit of a pirate raider, once! That was long ago. I hid aboard the ship; he did not know until too late to send me back. Since, only in oared ships, short turns along the coast of a holiday. They will not let a King’s daughter risk her life agoing to sea, if they can stop her.”
“Some day, Nela, when you are all-powerful and I am more so—when peace grows irksome, perhaps—we will fit out a fleet. Eight, ten, great sailing ships, high-prowed and strong. With oars, too, for emergencies, and beaks for ramming—something a man could fight with when needful. Then we will take off into the unknown oceans beyond Scorman, just to see what’s there! Eh?”
Nela clasped her hands suddenly together, crying out with pleasure at his fancy. “It would be good, yes! Just sail on and on, to see what is there that causes all the wild tales men who sail are always telling of the unknown seas.”
Jaron saw her eyes shine, the strange embarrassment had disappeared from between them.
“We would come back with some outlandish wizards, to work unknown magics for the entertainment of our court. We would bring the weird carved Gods of the Mingi home to plant in the dark rooms of the palace—so that their strange glow would light them of nights. The fighting plants of Onlaught, some of them for your rose-garden, to keep out thieves. Perhaps even a sea-demon, or some of the finny women of the Sea-people for our aquarium.”
Nela laughed. “You would like that, I suppose. I have heard their finned men are not hard to look at, either. Can I have some of them, my Lord and Master?”
“Sauce for the goose—” mumbled Jaron, his mouth still full. “You may eat now, maid-of-all-work, the master’s near finished.”
Even as Jaron was thinking that the play-acting of being a humble maid became Nela mightily, she stamped her green booted foot, swore an unladylike oath.
“Don’t carry your act too far, my fine bully!”
“Fails in first test,” murmured Jaron. “Too proud to live with comfortably.”
EVEN as she stood looking down angrily upon him, there came a sudden scream of pain from her mare, some twenty paces away. A dark, spotted shape had hurtled from under the thicket and sprang fully three lengths through the air, landing astride her back! She reared, the beast clung, claws raking great gashes across her shoulders.
The gelding, eyes rolling at this sudden attack on his companion, suddenly stampeded straight into the the thorn thicket, leaving a trail of blood and trampled, torn branches—and was gone. Jaron swept the sword from his shoulder leaped across the tiny crystal oval of the spring, slashed at the head of the big cat. It leaped, snarling, straight for his chest.
But he avoided the raking talons, got in a heavy slash as it passed, and it landed running—streaked away beneath the thorn branches.
Jaron turned the mare. She had sunk upon her forelegs, the lifeblood running out of her badly torn neck. Within short minutes she rolled over, lay helpless, panting for breath. Nela knelt, her eyes wet, stroking her head. In a short time she died. After kneeling there by the dead horse for a long space of silence, Nela shook her head to banish the shock of loss, stood and looked ruefully at her thin-soled purely decorative hunting boots.
“Walking is very good exercise, I’ve heard.” She said, her eyes finding Jaron’s.
“Pay no mind to that,” Jaron grunted. “Mind better the racket the horses made, and where that gelding flees—if the blue men did not hear, they’ll be sure to run across the horse and back track it to this place. Gather up the gear, stow it—we’ve got to make ourselves invisible within as short a space as we can.”
“So now you’re a wizard, among your other trades! Know you not wizardry is neither trusted nor loved by ordinary men?”
“No wizardry, just follow me.”
With his sword Jaron hacked the thorns from the upper side of a tree branch, leaped lightly up, pulled up the saddle-bags after. These he hung about his neck, then lifted Nela by her arms to a perch by his side. Carefully he cut the thorns; step by step they mounted, then began to cross the thicket thus laboriously, lost to view from the ground among the spiny leaves. The marks of their exit were visible only from above.
Their camp was marked now only by the body of the dead mare.
AN HOUR later, into the quiet of the thicket stole a file of giant blue warriors. Following the plain trail left by the scared gleding, they came as quiet as drifting shadows—in each hand a strung long-bow, arrow on nock. Seven foot of lean blue-skinned flesh, muscular as wrestlers—painted with the red dye of the war-trail. Faces marked in weird masks by the paint, their bodies traced everywhere with the same red pattern of waves and stars. There was too the curious symbol of the Black God, a crude drawing of the black tentacled amorphous shape of him—whether imagined so or really so—few knew.
There was a deadly intentness about their still stalking of the owners of the horse. About their loins was the skin of the great lizards called Tron-beasts, in their tongue.
Watching them, one would have been struck by their utter absorption in their job of man-killing, and known that here was a race to whom cruelty and the letting of alien blood was as worship to a fanatic of Omnu. Here was a race steeped in barbaric ritual, bred to think but one thought—war and the glory of war.
They stood in a ring about the dead horse, some traced the sign of the alien booted feet till it disappeared, then rejoined the ring about the horse. At last one made the sign of magic, the crossed fingers and the stamp of the foot. Then they filed out of the thicket, frustrated by Jaron’s simple ruse.
Well hidden in the branches of the tall trees beyond the thorn thicket, Jaron and Nela watched the file of warriors pass, too close for comfort. It was now late afternoon, and until darkness fell, Jaron and Nela made their way along the interlocking branches of the forest giants in the same general direction taken by the war-party.
Not long after the last of the file of warriors had passed, Nela and Jaron dropped again to the forest floor, ruefully taking stock of skin scrapes and thorn scratches. Then they began to follow the trail of the warriors, a faint worn path evidently used regularly. But it was soon too dark to follow the slight track, and Jaron lifted Nela again to the safety of the trees. He made a nest for them upon the wide crotch of limbs; they sat awaiting the rising of the moon and its calf.
Nestling in the crook of Jaron’s arm, Nela sighed wearily.
“I had no idea this trip would prove so strenuous.”
“In the wilderness, anything can happen and usually does,” answered Jaron, his own limbs aching with relief from the strain.
FROM afar came the sullen mutter of signal drums, moving across the hills as drum answered drum, and each of them knew the Blue men were talking of the strangers who had “disappeared.”
Nela yawned sleepily, then asked:
“Heard you ever the wizards tales of the other worlds, which they say the Gods tell them about?”
“I have heard much of that talk from my father’s court necromancer. They say that there are many worlds, up there where the stars hang so bright. Like ours, and unlike ours. Some where people rush about in great metal machines, sail through the air in vast boats, even dive to the ocean bottoms. Who live not in walled cities, but in great metal and rock towers, one above the other, like stacked chesses. But who knows?”
Nela went on musingly: “They say those worlds are round balls, like the moon and the moon-calf. That our own world is not flat, but round like a ball. I wonder if on those worlds there are couples sitting in the dark, speaking of our world? Of our Blue men, our great wild forests, our Sea-people, of our Demon race and our Bird-men and our dog-men? Of our magicians and their wonders, and of our wars when the blood runs clear across the whole land of Gran . . . Of our mysterious Gods, who never die, never seem to change as we do—from whom our magicians get their lore. If they speak of these things we kno
w so familiarly, as far-off wonders? Thinking of us as we think of them, as impossible fantasies created as much of dream stuff as of reality? Do you suppose that?”
“Yes, Nela.” Jaron’s voice was grave, and contained something of the quiet darkness and the wonder of far-off things. “I do think that is true, that in many nooks on many wonderful worlds there are men and women thinking and dreaming of us as we do now of them. And one day the men of our world will build ships to span those wide spaces between the worlds, and sail out to meet in friendship or to conquer the other worlds.”
“That will be long after we are dead and gone, Jaron. Life is such a short and bitter thing. I wish I were a God, never changing. Yet they must grow weary to death of their strange existence . . .”
“Cyre did not seem weary, when she allowed me to see her. Nor did she seem unchanging, but rather a flickering distillation of the beauty of change itself, frozen somehow into everlasting being. Such creatures are too much to understand.”
Jaron sank into moody silence, and the distant drums rumbled nearer, like marching giants. Now they were quite close, and numerous, beating in a wild stirring rhythm. Over the drums rose the shrill keening of flutes, riding the beat of the drums as a bone-thin witch might ride a horse.
“The Blue Men celebrate some ritual tonight. The temple cannot be far from this spot—the sound comes so clearly.”
Jaron nodded, listening. “Makes the blood chill in the veins, the music of the Blue Hordes. Somehow they are not human, but alien to our race. Heard you ever such peculiar dissonance, yet welded into fearful melody as if by memories of music alien to this world?”
“It is a strange meaning, behind the music they make. I know! They are sending a message to the Black God. It is his music, not human at all. They have learned it from contact with him!”
Jaron nodded. “That was my thought. I wondered if you sensed it, too. We’ve got to see this, we must know how and why they contact their Black God and what they intend. Now that they have the Fire Globe, Omnu only knows what they plan. Come!”
THE MOON was now slanting long rays through the maze of great limbs about them. Jaron rose, led the way across the mighty branches.
Closer and closer they drew to the source of the weird orchestration of the Blue Men. Now they could vaguely glimpse a great fire, and leaping about the light in dance the dark painted bodies. They stole closer, coming at last to the very edge of the cleared space, looking down at the temple from a height.
That pile was very ancient, perhaps not even built by the Blue Men, but by some greater race of the forgotten past. Shaped of the dark, veined night-stone, the veins of crystal shining over the black stones like the webs of gigantic spiders wet with dew. The dark forms of the ancient sculptured beings seemed to stir in the red flickering light, reaching their vast arms out of the past into this barbaric scene of the present.
Above the great temple doorway the arms of Megaera, the fury. Or was that Megale represented, the mother of the Gods? Jaron wondered idly at her sensuous great body stretched above the doorway, the brooding great stone face webbed over with the crystalline veining in the night-stone, and breathing down the spirit of unknown antiquity and of that strange all-knowing power of the Gods. Somewhere inside the vast old pile the Fire Globe waited for deliverance. For an instant Jaron felt a far-off sentence touch him, whispering faintly—“Yes, Jaron of Korl, for deliverance, my deliverance from the Black One.”
In front of the great doorway the log fire burned high, and Nela watched the naked Blue Women leap in suggestive, weird posturings, drawing more and more of the Blue warriors into their wild abandon.
Nela shuddered. “There is an evil to all this. Inside the temple the rites will climax the night’s entertainment, and the Black God will come to feed on the victims they bring him. It is a terrible belief they have concocted of their ignorance—this mating of the Blue horde with the Black God.”
Jaron nodded. “And Ennu seems to be the mainspring in the works of the evil mechanism building here. With the power of the Fire Globe to run it, the wisdom of the ancient Black God to give it wits, the numbers and fierce fighting ability of the Blue Horde to man it—what power among our people can stay its course toward dominance?”
“Yes, Jaron. I see now what was not clear to me before. I see what ambition drives Ennu and why he came plotting to me. I was a dupe, and not he mine, as I thought.”
“Above all, Nela, learn by this lesson. You can’t get good by an evil tool.”
“What can we do, Jaron? This is a mistake it seems no deed of ours can undo.”
“I am trusting Cyre to guide us. Meanwhile, let’s find and entrance to the temple from the rear, or from the side. This clearing at the front is too well lit, and crowded with the dancers. We can approach along the shadows of the stone huts, over there. Come!”
SLOWLY they circled the clearing, while below them the wild dancing went on and on, the heavy voices of the men chanting, the cries of the women rising in abandon. Their hands beating their thighs made a sound like a fall of great raindrops. Theirs was an emotional abandonment to primeval savagery, to the lusts of some creature like the Black God.
There was sitting and brooding above all that wild scene some ancient sprit of lusty uninhabited evil, drinking in the sight and sound as a serpent might lap milk—and Nela and Jaron sensed this presence as a thick mist chillingly sucking at their own small warmth and life.
The white teeth grinning in the dark blue faces, the naked limbs tossing as if the limbs of trees were bent and released continually by some invisible wind—Nela whispered: “One knows the dark Gods live, one can sense their will and their thought here! How different from our own Goddess Cyre, when she speaks or thinks of living and of love for us.”
Slowly they passed beyond the light of the leaping flames, reaching the shadowing dark where the bulk of the massive walls of the temple lay between them and the gathered horde. Jaron leaped to the soft sod, caught Nela’s body as she leaped after. He held her close for a moment, to reassure her, for he sensed her quivering nerves, then led the way along the shadows that lay black as fur between the crudely piled stone walls of the huts of the Blue Men.
Across the dim moon-lit patch of grass a dark veined column of sculptured stone marked the dim doorway, a black and ominous shadow behind the stone figure. Jaron glided across this open space, pausing beside the pillaring stone figure. He froze for a second into immobility as he noted a movement beyond Nela’s crouching figure. Then she screamed, once, and her figure fell backward, was flung aloft to some almost invisible shoulder and disappeared!
Jaron found his sword in his hand, himself speeding back into the shadows of the huts—only to stop, pivoting to avoid the gleam of steel darting at his chest. Jaron backed, slashing down a trio of blades as he drew his assailants into the dim moonlight.
The swords of the Blue Men were long, leaf-shaped, hammered out of crudely smelted soft iron, hardened and tempered badly, yet heavy. There was a tricky wave in the blade, that made the eye find it hard to gauge the balance of the weapon in an opponent’s hand, and Jaron slashed, parried, leaped and lunged in a mad effort to cut down the numbers of his attackers.
But as quickly as one tall, scowling shape fell, two took his place in the growing ring about Jaron, Jaron grimaced as he got his back against the stone of the great sculptured pillar, his sword weaving a maze of deadly magic before him—and again and again a tall warrior screamed and staggered backward out of the ring. The savages did not dart forward now, but only kept their points toward him, keeping well out of his reach.
Jaron waited, too, resting his point on the grass and mocking them with shining teeth and what few curses he could think of in their tongue—such as “swine of the forests” and “sons of snakes.” Which puny cursing failed to madden them sufficiently to give him a chance to kill another.
Quite suddenly a great blow struck his shoulder from behind, and he wheeled and threw up his arm, staggering—but
a flight of flaming birds seemed to explode into fragments behind his eyes, leaving him only a black pit that was himself.
Jaron struggled to consciousness out of that pit of blackness, groaning and trying in vain to rub his throbbing skull. He opened his eyes, found himself looking at his own length, bound about with endless turns of woven fibre rope, and the cold stones of the temple floor against his back. He writhed against his bonds; they held firm. He rolled over, to find his face within inches of Nela’s.
SHE WAS no longer the immaculate Queen. Her hair streamed in wild tangled disorder. Her face was smudged and scratched. Her green leather garments had been torn to shreds, leaving her only a few fragments of her former costume.
Outside the dim, vast chamber, Jaron could hear the steady throb of the drums and the cries of the leaping dancers.
Steps came slowly toward them. Jaron twisted, looked up into a lean face gashed across with a thin wide mouth, a mouth that smiled gloatingly. The man had a cruel hooked nose, and deep-set eyes with no light of humanity—but only a cold glare of triumph. His bony frame was covered with a loose black cloak, making a picture of somehow impressive power, towering above their helpless bound bodies.
In spite of his repellent appearance, Jaron recognized the light of evil wisdom, the conscious respect for thought that all wisdom brings—and recognized too the paraphernalia of the professional sorcerer hung about his waist from a heavy braided belt. There was the forbidden crystal of malnesite, which hung clasped in the golden fingers of that tool called the “Hand of Death”. There was the malefic charm of the seven sisters, that black shriveled cluster of tiny heads, that no ordinary man could ever learn whence they came—so small they were to be human heads, and so very evil of face. There was the silver mace, dangling on its small chain of moon-stones, that is allowed only to the Masters of the Forbidden Guild.
Jaron recognized Ennu easily enough. There was no mistaking him.
“Is this how you customarily receive emissaries, Ennu, Lord of the Secrets of Fools that your baubles proclaim you?” Jaron asked softly.
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 9